Claud Eustace Teal is a fictional character who made many appearances in a series of novels, novellas and short stories by Leslie Charteris featuring The Saint, starting in 1929.

(The first Saint story, 1928's Meet - The Tiger!, predated Daredevil and featured a character named Detective Carn, who was a template for the later Teal).

[2] Teal first appeared opposite Simon Templar in several novella-length stories that appeared in the UK magazine Thriller in the spring and summer of 1929; several were published in 1930 as the collection Enter the Saint (which is where most readers were first exposed to Teal),[3] though the earliest stories in the series would not be published in book form until they were rewritten and included in a later collection, Featuring the Saint.

[4][5] At some point, Teal received a promotion to Chief Inspector and he is identified with this rank for the first time in the short story collection The Brighter Buccaneer.

[6] Teal is described as a heavy set, blue-eyed, perpetually weary policeman who, instead of smoking (a common behaviour during the era), had mints regularly.

Indeed, in several of the early Saint books (including The Holy Terror), Teal states outright that he would consider Templar a friend if they weren't on the opposite sides of the law.

(In one early story, he braves entering a gas-filled cellar – at grave risk of being gassed to death himself – in order to carry an unconscious Templar to safety, an action he later half-jokingly regrets.

[15] Published more than a quarter century after Teal's literary debut, this was one of the few occasions in which Charteris acknowledged the passing of time in the Saint books, as he otherwise depicted Templar as an ageless hero.

Generally (though not always) dramatic depictions of Teal have presented him as a rather less competent policeman than in the novels, with his ponderous approach exaggerated at the expense of his detection abilities.

In his most significant adaptation (the 1960s British television series) he is presented as almost incompetent, with his success in solving cases always down to the efforts of Simon Templar.

Teal appeared in several early episodes played by other actors (Campbell Singer, Norman Pitt and Wensley Pithey respectively).

The character did not appear in the spin-off, 1978's Return of the Saint, but did make a reappearance in the first episode of the 1989 series of TV movies starring Simon Dutton.